A Short Journey Through Southern Oaxaca

December 2020

Thanks so much for donating to your chosen charity and participating in the mezcal room’s holiday giveaway! Collectively, we raised hundreds of dollars for causes ranging from medical clinics to a food bank to housing and employment services for homeless youth. It means a lot that you chose to take part.

Your thank-you flight represents a focused and hopefully delicious sampler of the full diversity you can encounter when tasting traditional agave spirits. For a more spontaneous and interactive affair, you may want to join for the Zoom happy hour (details to come via email)! But even if you aren’t able to join, the information here will hopefully enrich your experience of what you’re tasting, and provide a sense of the context and contrasts present in your flight.

As always, feel free to email hello@mezcal.nyc with any questions, or just to say hello! So: What’s up with this “journey through southern Oaxaca”?

Of the handful of Mexican states allowed to officially certify their agave spirits as “mezcal,” the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is both the most famous for mezcal production and produces the single largest volume (and a vast majority of what is exported). It is significantly more diverse — geographically, culturally, linguistically — than many large countries, despite being roughly the size of Indiana. It follows, then, that there isn’t really a single, monolithic style of Oaxacan mezcal.

Instead, you might think of Oaxaca as a patchwork of micro-regions, the same way we more familiarly understand that different wine regions in France have different grapes, soils and climates, flavors and to some degree production practices. The map of Oaxacan mezcal-producing regions above, from the Maestros del Mezcal organization, reflects this. Take a good look and find the reddish, sort of clay-colored lump of land at the bottom (labeled 10 in blue) and the peach-colored area to the west of it (number 8). These are where the spirits in your flight come from — the southern regions, respectively, of Miahuatlán and Ejutla, about an hour and a half to two hours south of Oaxaca City.

You could write an entire thesis about each of these regions, but here are a few general facts to know. We’re mostly talking about dry (but not quite desert) cropland framed by mountains to the west and south, which separate these inland areas from Oaxaca’s coastal resorts. Mezcal producers here are often small-scale family farmers, and many utilize the traditional milpa system of agriculture, with agaves cultivated alongside corn (always corn) and often beans and squash. There’s also a bit of a frontier-ish air to these parts, which reflect a combination of village life, the historical isolation from (and sometimes defiance of) the central government and a certain amount of drug cultivation and other gray and black market economies.

But enough throat-clearing. What about the mezcals themselves? Depending on your flight, you’ll begin with either Valente Garcia or Pedro Vasquez.

1.

Alipus San Andrés, Valente Angel Garcia Juarez. Agave: 90% Espadin and 10% Bicuixe (Agave angustifolia and Agave karwinskii). Santa Maria la Pila, Miahuatlan, Oaxaca. Copper distilled. 47.3% alcohol. Lot SAM007/18.

OR

Nuestra Soledad Lachiguí, Pedro Vasquez. Agave: Espadin (Agave angustifolia). Lachiguí, El Palmar, Miahuatlan, Oaxaca. Copper distilled. 48% alcohol. 2016, Edition 5.

These are two bottles that were more than half empty, which is why some people got one of them and some people got the other. They’re also two of the best sub-$60 mezcals you can reliably find in New York. And finally, they’re stunning examples of espadin — the most common cultivated agave variety used for mezcal production — from Miahuatlán, with much of the region’s characteristic minerality and intensity, though the Alipus also contains a bit of bicuixe.

These are both pretty famous maestros mezcaleros (master mezcal producers), with Don Valente having been bottled by the Mezcalero series and Palenqueros in addition to Alipus, while Pedro Vasquez is the producer behind many of El Jolgorio’s coveted “black bottle” releases.

In terms of tasting notes, I get an especially rich and fruity profile from Pedro Vasquez’s batch, with aromas of banana and burnt sugar and tastes that lean toward figs and apple, with a slightly salty finish and maybe even a bit of roasted tea in there at the end. Valente Garcia’s batch, in contrast, leans in an earthier, more savory, almost chocolatey direction, with berries and licorice and a hotter, more austere vibe. It’s worth noting that these were both distilled in standard copper pot stills, as I understand it, without the use of the “refrescadera” technique used by some Miahuatlán producers.

2.

Reina Sanchez Mexicano Sierrudo, bottled by Rezpiral. Agave: Mexicano sierrudo (Agave americana). San Luis Amatlan, Miahuatlan, Oaxaca. Hand milled, copper distilled. 47% alcohol. 2017, Rezpiral Series 2.

This is a cool, older bottling from one of Oaxaca’s few famous mezcaleras (female producers). It’s also an interesting contrast with your espadin, because it’s from the same region of Oaxaca, more or less, and made with similar techniques — with some variation, of course — but you’re tasting a different agave variety and a different person’s work.

The gap between the espadin and the Mexicano sierrudo is particularly interesting from a more abstract, historical perspective as well as a taste one: Historically, subvarieties of the large and relatively slow-maturing Agave americana species (like Mexicano sierrudo) were widely cultivated in southern Oaxaca and were among the most commonly used varieties for agave spirits, but in more recent decades they have been overtaken by the espadin. So here, in a sense, you’re arguably kind of tasting what would have been a more typical south Oaxacan mezcal before roughly the 1980s, at least as far as the agave is concerned, and are able to compare it with a more contemporary mezcal.

This is a particularly elegant and deeply flavored batch from the independent bottler Rezpiral, whose bottles you can reliably find in New York and elsewhere in the U.S., although the releases are always changing and some of them can be pricey. I’ll have to update this webpage later with tasting notes (because the bottle is currently packed in the car for holiday travel!), but I recall it having a lot of spiciness and earthiness, in addition to just being really good.

3.

Aristeo Ramirez Tobala Puntas. Agave: Tobala (Agave potatorum). La Compania, Ejutla, Oaxaca. Hand milled, distilled in copper still with plates. 62% alcohol (the high-proof “puntas,” or heads, of the distillation). March 2016.

Here’s an exciting offering for which no comparable substitute exists commercially in the United States — I bought this bottle from a hobbyist-scale independent bottler in Mexico City. Also, a warning if you’re just trying it now: It’s hot! As in boozy. It’s at least 60 to 65% alcohol (that 62% is almost certainly an estimate) and might be as high as 70 or more, so please drink it slowly. Although as I’ll describe here, that heat is part of the point.

With this bottle, we leap from Miahuatlán and standard copper pot distillation to the neighboring region of Ejutla and something a little different. While I don’t really know anything about Aristeo Ramirez personally, as he has zero perceptible web presence and I didn’t meet him, there are two aspects of this spirit that make it classically Ejutlan. First is the use of a locally specific distilling technology (copper still with plates), which is extremely efficient, almost like a miniature column still instead of a pot still, and often enables the master producer to achieve a very high proof with a single distillation pass. And second, the spirit, according to local tastes, is bottled without much if any dilution. (The term “puntas” refers to the heads — the boozy and often somewhat volatile part — of a distillation run.)

This bottle, too, is sadly now packed irretrievably in the car, so I’ll leave you with some tasting notes from a guest who sampled this as part of a Zoom tasting earlier in the year. He found it thick and oily, with notes of raspberry, coriander and minerals. He concluded: “Not something I would want all of the time, but it is just so wonderfully bursting with weird flavors and is quite fantastic.”